Features May 2007

Hayek & the intellectuals

On the changing relationship between the Austrian economist and bien-pensant thinkers.

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A rule, which, in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive. —David Hume

It is one of the most disheartening spectacles of our time to see to what extent some of the most precious things which England … has given to the world are now held in contempt in England herself. —Friedrich A. Hayek

We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become. —Benito Mussolini

In fact, Benito, you weren’t the first. The palm for first promulgating that principle in all its modern awfulness must go to V. I. Lenin, who back in 1917 boasted that when he finished building his workers’ paradise “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single...

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